Category: Uncategorized

…like a customer scorned. The Ben, he is not so happy with The Amex these days.

It’s easy to take Jay Rosen’s eloquence for granted. Don’t. As one of the the most thought-ful (hyphen intended) people I’ve encountered over the last few years, Jay consistently triggers thoughts and conversation that raise the bar for those around him.

Had a great lunch with Jay at Bloggercon over the weekend and just found a link to his piece, “The People Formerly Known As The Audience” in my inbox. In the same vein as Cluetrain (the impact of which the Social Customer Manifesto humbly aspires to achieve a fraction), Jay has nailed his points to the door. A few are reproduced here. Rosen:

“The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

• Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.
• Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.
• Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
• You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.
• A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not ‘across’ to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.”

While Rosen shines the spotlight on the audiences of media, all of us are catching the reflected glow as participants in every marketplace. The points made above are not restricted to the world of media, or of journalism. They are, instead, another channel marker on a collaborative, generation-long journey where we all get to choose the ports-of-call.

Coastside Wine Dinner
Friday, 30 June 2006
Half Moon Bay, California
Time: 8:00pm – 10:00pm (or later, if things are rolling)
Venue: Enso Gallery – 131 Kelly Avenue, Half Moon Bay, California 94019
Map

The folks at Stormhoek are sending us free wine (more here), so we figured it we’d get some friends together and try it out. In other words, good folks, conversations and copious vino tinto. We may also try to do some introductory fire spinning.

You’ll notice from the map above that we’re right on the ocean. If conditions are right, we may even get an amazing beach sunset out of the deal.

We’ll probably all pitch in and get some appetizers to graze on. Feel free to invite others.

Interested? Sign up here!

See you there. Or online here.

Cerado’s own Leif Chastaine will be in Chicago tomorrow, presenting on Enterprise Social Networking at the American Marketing Association’s “Ahead of the Curve” session, which focuses on high-tech trends in marketing. Drop him a note if you want to get together.

Am at Supernova today, and JP Rangaswami just brought up a very interesting point. He asserted that there are really only three fundamental business processes, and each of these is enabled by a collaborative technology. The three processes are:

• Idea-to-market: Creating a new concept, and bringing it to market. This process is enabled by co-creation.
• Problem-to-repair: Identifying, diagnosing, and fixing issues. This process is enabled by instant messaging and other real-time and offline collaboration technologies.
• Sales-to-cash: This is all about execution. When a sale occurs, what are the steps that need to occur to deliver what was promised, and get that process done quickly, efficiently and repeatably? This process is enabled by collaborative workflow.

Interesting thought.

Was at a (boisterous!) dinner last week in New York with a number of folks after the Corante Innovative Marketing Conference (more on this in a future post), and the podcasting recorders were rolling during a good portion of the evening.

At one point, Joseph Jaffe was talking about “consumers” and, of course, this tripped my Pavlovian response that, no, we are not “consumers.” We are customers, and producers, and people. (Doc and Jerry, your presence was missed!)

Listen to the “‘consumer’ vs. ‘customer’ vs. ‘user’ rant.” (5.6MB MP3)

This is a short snippet of the longer Across The Sound podcast #36.

So…what do you think? Are we customers? Consumers? Users? Something else? Please send e-mail (including MP3 attachments) to [email protected] or audio comments to +1 206 203-3255 if you want to jump into the conversation.

(photo credit: niznoz)

Just received a Pot au Feu from the workshop of the fantastic John T. Unger! (John is also MC at typepadhacks.org, and the only person on the planet that makes art to pay for his tech habit.)

Thanks, John! Next step…accelerants!

Dave Winer says that we need to “drop the B” in Web 2.0, and make is “WE 2.0.” I agree with commenter Monty, who says “It’s not people that need an upgrade to fit technology, it’s technology that needs an upgrade to fit people.”

So, Dave…right idea, wrong “B.”

Here’s my thought: What we’re really doing is turning the World Wide Web into the World Wide WE.

The “World Wide WE”…I like that.

The ever-cogent Christopher Allen brought the idea of the “Familiar Stranger” to my attention in a comment on yesterday’s “Werewolves…” post. Chris writes:

“One concept related to progressive trust that you might be interested in is the “familiar stranger”. When you see someone in the hall that you’ve seen before, maybe nodded to, but don’t actually know, that is a “familiar stranger”. Our sense of comfort in social situations is often bounded by the percentage of people that are familiar strangers, as well as our sense of safety in our communities. There is quite a bit of interesting research on this topic.

How it relates to progressive trust is that even before you get to the point where you are consciously moving forward on gaining mutual trust, you may have already established some by already being a familiar stranger. You are also more likely to default trust someone more if there are lots of familar strangers around.”

The folks at Intel Research @ Berkeley bring us this further definition:

“The Familiar Stranger is a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject. Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with. By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. The claim is that the relationship we have with these Familiar Strangers is indeed a real relationship in which both parties agree to mutually ignore each other, without any implications of hostility. A good example is a person that one sees on the subway every morning. If that person fails to appear, we notice.

Familiar Strangers form a border zone between people we know and the completely unknown strangers we encounter once and never see again. While we are bound to the people we know by a circle of social reciprocity, no such bond exists between us and complete strangers. Familiar Strangers buffer the middle ground between these two relationships. Because we encounter them regularly in familiar settings, they establish our connection to individual places.”

I love this concept of the “familiar stranger,” especially when it’s linked up with Kathy Sierra’s recent thoughts (she calls it “the-guy-from-the-train phenomenon“). Kathy writes:

“You know the story: you take the same train to work every day. One Saturday afternoon you’re in a cafe when you spot a familiar face at the next table. “Hey, it’s the guy from the train!” you think, with a smile. Then the guy from the train notices you, and his eyes light up. You start a lively conversation moving from weather to espresso to geopolitical forces. You exchange URLs.

The thing is, you took the train with this guy for the last 18 months and never gave him a moment’s thought…until you saw him at the cafe.

That’s the power of unexpected context.”

Not only does the familiar stranger bring trust to a public place, but placing the familiar stranger in an out-of-context environment may be the catalyst that converts the “familiar stranger” into a friend and catalyzes the trust relationship between two individuals.

I like the symmetry in that.

(photo credit: toronto_lex)